For decades, elected commissioners in the Georgia counties of Fulton and DeKalb have appointed all 10 members of the board of trustees at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. The county commissioners' power, however, would be diminished should Grady shift control over policies and budget from the Grady board to a proposed nonprofit. Ironically, Fulton and DeKalb must give final consent for the change to occur.
Advocates for state Medicaid patients who need interpreters say they worry that cuts in Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell's budget proposal could jeopardize access to crucial services and information. Rell's budget proposal recommends eliminating $4.7 million that had been set aside for the translation services in the 2008-09 budget. A coalition advocating for the translators said that about 22,000 patients statewide who speak a total of 65 languages need the service.
Patient's Compensation Fund surcharge rates in Indiana will be reduced 19 percent for doctors and 1 percent for hospitals starting March 1, 2008, according to the state Department of Insurance. The fund was established in 1976 to help compensate malpractice victims. Healthcare providers contribute to it on a voluntary basis, and the vast majority of Indiana's doctors participate.
Massachusetts officials are considering raising premiums as much as 14 percent and doubling some copayments for the a subsidized insurance program. State officials said they want to ensure that the program does not collapse under the weight of soaring costs or under a potential influx of residents whose employers drop coverage because the program offers a better deal for their workers. But some say the hikes would price people out of the program.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts has announced that it will require all the state's hospitals to fully install a computerized medication ordering system within four years or face a loss of lucrative payouts from an incentive program promoting good-quality care. Currently, 10 hospitals in the state have fully adopted the computerized system that requires doctors to type in medical orders, including prescriptions, diagnostic tests, and blood work. The remaining 63 hospitals, mostly community hospitals, have been slower to embrace the new technology.
A burgeoning medical travel industry is aggressively wooing older patients by offering joint-replacement surgeries and non-emergency cardiac procedures at 40 percent to 80 percent less than in the United States. Most older adults who go overseas for cheaper care are uninsured. But even the insured might soon be encouraged by their employers, via financial incentives like lower out-of-pocket costs, to go abroad for such care.
Hospitals in the New York City region are exploring gentler methods of delivering care. Part marketing strategy and part effort to offer more humane treatment, the approach is creating an environment of tenderness, compassion and respect that can help people heal better or more quickly, say hospital administrators.
Medicare has already announced that it will stop paying hospitals for errors beginning in October, and other insurers are following close behind. The trend has led the nation's hospitals to explore innovative programs to prevent injury and infection, such as hand-washing spies, surgical sponges that sound an alarm if left in the body, and even a room sterilizer that promises to wipe out bacteria left lurking on bedrails.
Four years ago, officials in Montgomery County, MD, launched Montgomery Cares, a program to care for the uninsured. Through the program, officials pledged to cover half of the county's estimated 80,000 uninsured residents by 2010. But two years from the deadline, officials say they won't come close to meeting their goal despite the opening of three new clinics and a 58 percent increase in the number of people receiving care.
A new report appears to show that providing patients with e-mail access to their surgeon appears to improve communication. "Despite the many concerns, we believe that this study shows that the provision to patients of readily available e-mail access to their surgeon provides a very effective means of improving communication prior to patients undergoing elective surgery," wrote the study's authors.
